In Virginia, "Jury's Still Out" on Global Warming. Christ.

Last week, in our weekly recap of what's going on in the various laboratories of democracy, I mentioned that the North Carolina state legislature had moved to combat the effects of global climate change on that state's seacoast by simply declaring that climate change didn't exist as far as the North Carolina state legislature was concerned. Now, it seems, that this revolutionary new approach is catching fire elsewhere. Virginia's losing its salt marshes by the acres, and the primary job of the state's political establishment seems to be that all will be well if they just don't mention why:

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To pass the bill, at Stolle's suggestion Northam excised the words "relative sea level rise" from an initial draft of the bill, replacing them with "recurrent flooding" in the final version. Stolle says the change was necessary to ensure the bill focused on the issues Virginia politicians can handle — flooding — and not those they cannot address — global warming. In any case, "the jury's still out" on mankind's contribution to global warming, he says. "Other folks can go argue about sea-level rise and global warming," Stolle says. "What matters is people's homes are getting destroyed, and that's what we want to focus on. To think that we are going to stop climate change is absolute hubris. The climate is going to change whether we're here or not."

And, some day, several millennia from now, when nature has begun evolution all over again with the bees, if there are any of those left after we get done with them, the bee lords will conduct earnest symposia about the mounting archaeological evidence that, once on this planet, stupidity was an extinction-level event.